A new low? Women in opera need change, but singing tenor roles isn’t it
A news report published in this weekend’s Observer, and picked up on by the Times the next day, suggested that professional singers whose voices mature and change can enjoy longer careers by taking what were traditionally male (tenor) roles. The pieces conflated and merged a number of issues that do not belong together: gender divisions in opera, change to voices post-pregnancy or menopause, transgender singing and women singing the tenor line in an often amateur choral setting.
“Looser gender divisions in casting” may well be possible in Shakespearean theatre, where speaking rather than singing voices are involved, but there are no female professional opera singers, even those of us who sing in the contralto range, begging to sing tenor roles such as Rodolfo (in Puccini’s La Bohème) or Alfredo (in Verdi’s La Traviata) at pitch. To suggest this is desirable, let alone possible, ignores the nature and limits of operatic voices.
I spoke to Declan Costello, a leading consultant ENT surgeon specialising in the voice about this. “The quality of a person’s voice depends on a number of different things: the vocal cords (vocal folds) are certainly critical, but just as important are the vocal resonators, which give the voice its characteristic bloom by bringing out certain overtones (or harmonics),” he said. “While it is true to say that a contralto can sing A440 (the A above middle C) at the same intensity as a tenor, the quality produced by the two of them is entirely different: a tenor is close to the top of his register, and one hears this in the effort and brightness in the sound because the shape of his male pharynx is accentuating certain of the overtones. Indeed, it is precisely this effect that makes a high tenor note so exciting to listen to. On the other hand, a contralto singing the same note with equal volume (ie the same number of decibels) will have a more mellow tone because she is using different harmonics.”
“Looser gender divisions in casting” may well be possible in Shakespearean theatre, where speaking rather than singing voices are involved, but there are no female professional opera singers, even those of us who sing in the contralto range, begging to sing tenor roles such as Rodolfo (in Puccini’s La Bohème) or Alfredo (in Verdi’s La Traviata) at pitch. To suggest this is desirable, let alone possible, ignores the nature and limits of operatic voices.
I spoke to Declan Costello, a leading consultant ENT surgeon specialising in the voice about this. “The quality of a person’s voice depends on a number of different things: the vocal cords (vocal folds) are certainly critical, but just as important are the vocal resonators, which give the voice its characteristic bloom by bringing out certain overtones (or harmonics),” he said. “While it is true to say that a contralto can sing A440 (the A above middle C) at the same intensity as a tenor, the quality produced by the two of them is entirely different: a tenor is close to the top of his register, and one hears this in the effort and brightness in the sound because the shape of his male pharynx is accentuating certain of the overtones. Indeed, it is precisely this effect that makes a high tenor note so exciting to listen to. On the other hand, a contralto singing the same note with equal volume (ie the same number of decibels) will have a more mellow tone because she is using different harmonics.”
Source:
theguardian
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